School letter grades will be released later in the fall, but northeastern Louisiana schools are working with the 2014 grades provided by the Louisiana Department of Education. With 13 school districts in northeastern Louisiana, there are more than 130 schools, and 11 were marked failing in data released in fall 2014.

Three of those schools are in the Monroe City School District, and the Madison, Morehouse, Ouachita and Richland school districts each have two failing schools.

The three failing schools in the Monroe City district are Carroll High School, Martin Luther King Junior High School and Sherrouse School.

Brent Vidrine, superintendent of Monroe City schools, said the district will continue to look at the individual students and help the teachers bring their curriculum in line with the state tests.

"We have instituted progressive monitoring for student achievement for each nine weeks with a quality common proficiency test each nine weeks in core subjects," he said. "We have also established calculators that correspond with the state School Performance Calculator that allow each teacher and school to calculate classroom-level school performance scores each nine weeks to check for proficiency results.

"We believe that this will allow teachers to compare their tests with the rigor of the state assessment tests, thus allowing for a common language for discussing performance and identifying students who need intervention."

He said Department of Education network team members and teachers have been participating in Professional Learning Communities and discussing new initiatives such as Jump Start, student performance and instructional best practices.

"We believe that through setting good Student Learning Targets with principals and teachers, monitoring progress and giving feedback that allows the understanding of the results, we can achieve an upward trend in these schools' school performance scores," he said.

In Ouachita, Shady Grove Elementary School and Swayze Elementary School were marked failing.

Ouachita Parish Superintendent Don Coker said the district has reduced the student-teacher ratio in some classes and has worked to get additional support for the teachers and school leadership.

"Both of the schools, their leadership will be going through a mentoring program with our principal fellowship principals that are out there," he said, noting the district received grant money to fund the program.

"We actually have three principals that are in the fellowship along with one of our professional accountability directors, and they're going to be helping and working with our schools. These two are targeted schools — both Shady Grove and Swayze — for our principals to hopefully be able to join some faculty meetings."

He said both schools have assistant principals and "pretty strong" curriculum leadership.

"I feel better about the fact we have good leadership teams at both of the schools that will be working with the teachers and in turn will be working with our students," he said.

"Our principals work very hard at the schools, as do the teachers, and it's just a matter of us making sure that we are teaching to what our students need and have them prepared and ready once these tests come out."

A key element to having prepared students, he said, is literacy, so increasing literacy has become a districtwide goal.

"Part of what we want to emphasize is that by the time a child exits second grade going to the third grade, they have that foundation and the fundamental reading skills that are going to make them successful as they move on throughout the elementary grades and into middle school," Coker said.

"We can't just expect our ELA (English Language Arts) teachers to be able to teach reading and they get it from there. So we're putting that on our math teachers, our science teachers, our social studies teachers and all of the core in order to do a little bit better on the literacy part with our scores."